Personal Responsibility

If you don't take control, something else will.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.'" - Carl Jung

Consider the idea that everything that has gone wrong in your life might be your fault.

Consider the idea that the reason you may be in bad relationships, hate your job and your house, your friends, your body, and your personality is because every decision you've made has inched you closer and closer toward your own personal hell.

Every time I talk about responsibility in this newsletter, I inevitably get a large number of unsubscribes. And I've been in that head space. I've sat on a cold hardwood floor drinking whiskey and whining about how nobody understood how difficult my life was. How nobody understood the trauma I'd had to deal with. That I couldn't just "buckle up" and "get out of bed" when every fiber of my being was bound to neurosis.

I was infuriated by the idea that I wasn't trying hard enough. Of course I was trying! Couldn't they see that I was trying?

Couldn't they see that my existence was just running up against walls, over and over again? That it was a miracle I was even still alive!

Then I'd sit down on the floor and cry. Take another sip of whiskey and wish that the cold lip of the glass bottle sat in the center of my stomach. 

The truth was I'd tried to abdicate my responsibility a long time ago. So I'd fallen down into the epicenter of my own madness. Everything I wrote was total garbage. My personal relationships were in the toilet. I lay in bed for days at a time, not getting any exercise or sunlight. I drank until I threw up. I complained endlessly about my work. I'd look at my body, wrecked from bad sleep and a bad diet, and cry because I hated it.

And the entire time I was convinced this was a product of mental illness, not that my behavior was creating the mental illness itself.

The idea of "personal responsibility" has become politicized, demonized, stratified, codified. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" has become a sort of conservative calling card. It's sneered at. Seen as callous and cruel and ignorant. People like to say that society is responsible for their unhappiness. Or capitalism. That if we lived under a different economic system we wouldn't be under the stress and burden of this aberrant suffering.

They forget that we have more economic mobility, prosperity, and technology than any other human society in existence. And that even if some modern complications have made life more complex, it doesn't mean that they have zero control over their own lives.

And even if we had universal basic income, and everything we needed to survive was produced and maintained by robots, I probably still would have ended up on that hardwood floor drinking whiskey and crying about my life. I had everything I needed at the time to make myself happy and yet I refused to grasp it.

People want to believe their happiness lies in some halcyon utopia just out of reach. That they're destined to be unhappy until the way has been paved for them to emerge into this new world. They see happiness like a dream and not something to be achieved. Something that just comes, surging through the darkness, to save them.

Utopia is a lie and it always will be. Every utopian structure throughout history has collapsed. Even in the best of circumstances problems will arise. Corruption will happen. Utopia is a state of crystalline molecular structure. It's a platonic form of an idea, frozen in time, that assumes energy states will never change.

And the human mind is engineered to want and desire more than it has. To dream of worlds yet achieved. That's one of the reasons it's so easy to convince ourselves we live in hell when we're sitting in air conditioned apartments, tweeting on our smart phones, and getting sushi delivered to our door via GrubHub while a Netflix movie plays on the wall. 

But even if Utopia is possible, it isn't achieved by sitting in bed eating Cheeto Puffs mixed with tears. It's achieved by going out and creating things. Inventing. Working. Struggling. Nobody's life was made better by sitting in bed all day. That's why if you sit in bed all day, you will not get one centimeter closer to getting what you want.

And let's imagine we all live in an irredeemably corrupt hell hole that's nothing but misery and suffering. Let's assume life is just constantly trying to push you back and destroy you, and every two steps you take forward you have to take one step back. Let's assume everyone in existence is hell bent to get you. 

The only thing you can control is yourself. So in order to change anything, you have to look at what you can do to change it.

Sometimes that means you need help. Sometimes a burden is too much and you need other people. But you have to go out and find that help. And the locus of responsibility for the kind of help you need, and how much, will always be on you.

That's true even if you have a mental illness. Even if you're disabled. Even if you have no family. No job. Even if you have seen a happy future eroded in front of you. Even if you fell from a tree and shattered all your bones. 

No matter how bad it gets, your responsibility always belongs to you. Which means you always have an opportunity to make things better than they are.

People don't want to take personal responsibility because, let's face it, it's difficult. We'd rather try to force the people around us to do something to make our lives better. Our spouse. Our children. Our government. Our jobs. We think that if only the world shaped up, we'd be able to get what we want. Often people never stop to think what they could do to improve the situation.

It's a form of ego delusion. We get to sit in the center, immobile like the sun, while other people rotate around us like planets. 

Most people would rather live a life of misery than take the first steps to admitting they could change something about what they're doing. Because that would mean they'd have to put in effort.

And if you saw returns on that effort you'd realize that maybe you weren't doing everything you could, after all.

And that's a hard lesson to learn. That sometimes we're not just succumbing to forces outside of our control.

Everyone wants to believe their boss is just horrible and their job sucks. They want to believe their husband or wife just "fell out of love" with them and they had no hand in eroding it with thousands of little decisions that created resentment. They want to believe their child just became a delinquent and they had no say in it.

But sometimes we're weak, and lazy, and delusional. Sometimes we behave poorly. Sometimes a catastrophe happens and we behave in the worst way possible. Sometimes we're ignorant. Sometimes we're bad. Sometimes we're just human. 

We don't want to recognize that. But the only way to fix our lives, and move toward something better, is realizing that.